Sunday, June 15, 2014

Killing the suspense: Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm (2013)

Recovering
from what for me was easily the worst cinematic experience of the year and in
the impossibility of rewinding the whole thing in my head, I decided that I had to
make something good out of it by at least trying to understand why it had been
so frustrating. Was it Xavier Dolan's omnipresent, falsely angelic face? Or maybe the exploitation of the theme of homosexuality to seek the viewer's
complicity? No. Apparently, it had something to do with camera placement.

Xavier
Dolan, born 1989, is a Canadian actor and director. He has risen to prominence
in the last five years with LGBT-themed dramas like I Killed My
Mother (2009), Laurence Anyways (2012) and the
recent Mommy (2014), which shared this year's Cannes Jury Prize
with Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, no less. Tom stands out somewhat from his other films, because it's "a psychological
thriller, and it’s dry and raw and rough and it’s in the country and it's
ugly", according to Dolan's own definition.
It tells the story of a young man (played by the director himself) who having
suffered the loss of his boyfriend Guillaume, resolves to attend his funeral despite
their relationship having hitherto been kept secret. When he arrives to the
titular farm he has to deal with Guillaume's grieving mother Agathe and the
violent, homophobic elder brother Francis. At once repelled and attracted by
Francis' macho attitude, Tom soon succumbs to an insane role play in which he
has to hide the true nature of his past relationship with Guillaume to
safeguard Agathe's supposedly fragile mental state. (Spoilers ahead.)

This seems
a good premise for a drama, but Dolan has other plans for us. After a boyishly
melodramatic opening with Tom scribbling a posthumous love letter to his
boyfriend, then driving to Guillaume's home to the tune of an agonizingly
ear-piercing song, the tone radically changes when Tom arrives at destination. The
atmosphere gets darker, an ominous music starts to play in the background, and
Tom performs the classic scene of the stranger who comes knocking at an isolated
house, insistently shouting "Anyone there?" as if an empty abode was too
bizarre a circumstance for him to accept. After eventually managing to surreptitiously
enter the farmhouse, he falls asleep at the kitchen table. Of course, we wait
for the homeowner to return: how will he or she react to the intrusion?

The
sequence inside the house is the first one that made me turn up my nose. It begins with a few establishing shots of Tom exploring the house that have the function to show that the protagonist finds himself in an extraneous and
potentially hostile environment.

This is confirmed by the next shot: at over eight minutes in, the film's title on a black screen signals that the premise has been set up, and alerts our attention on what happens next. At this point, a close-up on Tom sleeping impedes a complete view of the kitchen, reaffirming our suspicions that some encounter is about to take place. Dolan here is drawing upon the conventions of the thriller and horror genres, arousing our expectations for a sudden revelation of the off-screen space.

But then
Dolan frames the kitchen in a lengthy (about 8 seconds) long shot very similar to the
first one, except that now Agathe occupies the center right of the frame:

Are we
startled when we notice the figure in the foreground? I can tell you that when
I saw the film in the theater, no one in the audience had the slightest
reaction to this scene. Part due to the room's semidarkness, and part because
Agathe's coat and the wall are roughly of the same whitish color, we become
aware of her presence without any shock. Moreover, choosing to use a long shot
weakens the tension built with the previous shots, because it gives us
instantly access to all elements in a scene that not only is extremely static
but also has a considerable duration. To be completely fair, Dolan manages to
bring a soupcon of suspense by framing the first and the last shot from the
same position, because we instinctively react to the graphic differences
between the two shots even before becoming aware of the presence of a new
character. However, as we have seen, the effect is diluted by the shot's length
as well as the wide view provided by the long shot.

After the
funeral has taken place, we get another interesting example of ineffective
camera placement. Tom has decided not to give the funeral speech he and Francis
had previously agreed upon, so we assume Francis will be enraged. As Tom goes
to the church's restroom, we first get a medium shot of Tom's back while he relieves
himself. Showing the character's back seems to me a good choice, since it makes
him appear vulnerable and unaware of what will happen.

The
claustrophobic environment increases the tension as well. Will Francis suddenly
attack him from behind? In the next shot the camera turns by 90 degrees and
frames Tom in a medium close-up as he's about to open the toilet's door:

The point
of view has changed, so that we now expect Francis to jump from the right. No
such luck: likewise in the previous sequence, we get a medium long-shot of Francis
patiently waiting outside the toilet, apparently unwilling to disturb his
victim. When Tom eventually shows up, we have to wait approximately 25 seconds
before the conflict begins. They exchange a few lines of dialogue, then the scene
delivers, sorta, when Francis pushes Tom in the toilet again. The sequence closes
on a medium close-up of Tom and Francis confronting each other in the toilet.

What is our
reaction this time? The first two shots convey the sense that Tom is in a no-escape
situation, because the close framing allows us to share his space in an almost
physical way. Like in the kitchen scene, a restricted knowledge of the environment
here keeps us uncertain about Francis' imminent appearance. But the third shot fatally
breaks our connection with Tom, at the same time making us aware of the exact
spatial relationship between Tom and Francis way before their scuffle begins.
We have so much time to contemplate the scene's configuration that we almost
know in advance how the action will unfold. The actors' hesitant performances
definitely contribute to the lack of tension, but above all it's the unwise
placement of the camera together with the ineffective staging that make the scene
fall flat. This is not to say, however, that cutting to a wider shot
automatically loosens the tension. As we will see in the next example, Dolan
himself provides a more successful instance of this strategy later in the film.

As the
story develops, things get more and more ambiguous between Tom and Francis.
Repulsion makes room for an unwholesome mutual attraction, and I suppose at
this point we could not seriously hope to be spared a tango scene in the barn. Judgment
put aside, let's see how Dolan arranges the scene. A long shot taken from a
high angle establishes the spacious environment of the barn, with the open door
on the center-left side of the frame and the sunlight breaking from the windows
on the right. An alternation of medium shots and medium close-ups gives the
dance a hectic rhythm:

While they
dance, Francis explains Tom that he has gotten tired to live with his mother, and
that sometimes he even wishes she would die. Now Dolan cuts to a long shot
taken from the same vantage point of the first shot, revealing Agathe standing
immobile at the door while Tom and Francis are performing a dance movement
which continues into the next shot. The dance abruptly ends as the characters
realize that someone is observing them:

This time
the editing has successfully conveyed a surprise effect. This is due, I think,
to many factors. First, the scene's dynamism guides our eyes towards the dance,
so that it's somewhat startling to register that another element in the frame
is claiming our attention. The effect is enhanced by a chromatic contrast,
since Agathe appears in the only cool color portion of a predominantly reddish
composition. Moreover, Agathe's frozenness comes out as menacing if compared to
the boys' excitement (recall for comparison the kitchen scene, where both Tom
and Agathe were frozen in their positions). What also contributes to heighten
the tension is, of course, that we fear Agathe's reaction ̶ after
all, within a single instant she is confronted with the eventuality that both
her dead son and the living one are homosexual. In this case staging, editing
and the characters' restricted knowledge (Agathe about her sons' sexual
orientation, Tom and Francis about being watched) successfully contribute to
the final effect.

I'd like to
consider one more scene (sorry, but it's another crappy one). Near the film's
end, Tom has eventually decided to escape from the farm, but apparently Francis
hasn't taken it very well: as Tom is walking along a B road at night, a car's
headlights appear in the distance behind him. So he leaves the road and hides in the wood:

Obviously, we wonder if Francis will be able to catch him. At this
point, our old friend the long shot comes back:

If we had
any doubts about Francis' position with respect to Tom, this shot clarifies
once and for all that he has still to cover a lot of ground before he reaches
Tom. Once again, the camera finds itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now
back in the wood. Tom lays crouched down behind a tree trunk, and for an
infinitesimal instant he and his chaser even share the same space on screen as
Francis' silhouette emerges in the background, perhaps suggesting that there
still exist a remote eventuality that the escape could fail (why the aspect ratio changes at times, I can't figure out):

At this
point, Tom realizes that the time is right for him to leave his hiding place,
but again the camera abandons him just like in the toilet scene, staying
instead with Francis as he helplessly tries to discern Tom in the darkness. He
doesn't see anything, and neither do we. As the sound of a starting car
announces that Tom is finally in safety, Francis falls prey to desperation. Perhaps
in an extreme attempt to extort a last breath of suspense, the camera follows
him running in Tom's direction:

The car stays
off screen all the time, a clear hint that we don't have to seriously worry
about the possibility that he will succeed in catching Tom. The conclusion doesn't
catch us off guard:

Strangely,
in this situation the camera seems to feel more affection for the antagonist
than for the hero, as if we were asked to feel more empathy for Francis as his only
chance for redemption vanishes in the horizon. Actually, in more than one
occasion I had the impression Dolan felt compelled to pay his dues to the
thriller genre, whereas his real concern was exploring Tom and Francis' sick
dynamics. The many hints about Francis' latent homosexuality could have been
explored in greater depth, but they get sacrificed to Dolan's self-imposed
boundaries. It's possible that beneath Tom's thriller
surface lays a far better movie.

In
conclusion, elements like staging, camera placement and shot length can deeply
affect our enjoyment of a movie, especially for a genre like thriller that relies
so much on good timing to elicit a response from the audience. I learn from
another interview that at the time Dolan shot Tom, he had not seen a single
Hitchcock film. I wish he had.

About Me

What They Say About This Blog

my blog in italian

"Every encounter between a man and a woman starts off as if it were the first such meeting on earth. As if there haven't already been billions of such encounters since the time of Adam and Eve. You see, experience in love is nontransferable. This is a great misfortune. And a great piece of luck."